


The Water Rises

by leaves_girl



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-24
Updated: 2013-08-24
Packaged: 2017-12-24 13:03:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/940304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leaves_girl/pseuds/leaves_girl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His goodness dies slowly.</p>
<p>Written for the kink meme prompt "the old witch tests, including the "water test", that were used to determine if someone was a witch."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Water Rises

There is a hamlet on the outskirts of Camelot with a chair tied to a stout pole. Most days, it is empty, and the riverbank on which it rests is deserted. Once every few years, when the tiny hamlet is stuffed too full with fear or suspicion or desperation, someone is tied into the chair, and the pole is lowered into the river, and they drown. 

The chair is meant to test for sorcery, theory being that no sorcerer would willingly drown, and that no one could escape the ropes without magic. In practice, this means that if the accused somehow manages to survive the water, they will burn.

Uino the dogsbody hails from that village. As a child, he broke his neighbor’s fence and came down ill the next day. Uino’s mother accused the neighbor of cursing him, and Uino himself asked to tie the ropes. “I tied them loose,” Uino once confessed brokenly. “She made the choice to stay.” Merlin had put his hand on Uino’s shoulder and didn’t say anything, but the image stays with him. 

Merlin has resigned himself to the hypocrisy of Camelot. What warlock strong enough to threaten the city wouldn’t be able to break a cell door, or stay an axe, or quench the flames? What he can never grow used to are the choices Camelot gives the powerful. Kill the grieving mother, save the druid boy, stop the prince from killing his father, save his father, spare his sister. Merlin always has choices to make. It was the choices that finally drove Morgana mad. 

Uino the dogsbody is tied to a pole before him, and the brush is catching flame with a guard’s torch. Merlin could loosen his ropes. He could help him escape, and stop the knights, and kill the king, and save everyone who might ever suffer what this pale-faced man is about to suffer. He could lose Arthur’s friendship, leave him unprotected, and destroy the shining future the dragon spoke of. Or maybe he could stop the fire surreptitiously, leaving Uther wild-eyed and wailing for blood. Maybe Arthur would have to make the choice of whether or not to put down his father.

Merlin’s mother never worried about him playing in the creek or wandering the woods at night, or even being burned at the stake. She wouldn’t have sent him to Camelot if she worried about those things. Hunith was sensible enough to worry about his friendships instead, and what kind of a man Merlin could become if there weren’t one person close to him who never realized that they were only standing beside him because Merlin let them. Merlin thinks of himself as a good person, and it is that, more than liberty or life, that he’s afraid of losing to Camelot.

He closes his eyes, and the water rises.


End file.
